Periods

Dividing literary history into periods is always a tricky matter,
because cultural change never happens all at once. In other
words, people didn't wake up on 1 January 1500 and suddenly
change their habits from medieval to
Renaissance. Besides, literary
and cultural movements rarely coincide with century boundaries.
To make matters worse, periods differ from country to country 
by the time England got around to having a Renaissance, Italy's
Renaissance was long since over (and that's to say nothing about
such incommensurable traditions as Sri Lanka or Ghana).

With those caveats in mind, though, we can at least consider the
usual
Some common designations for English literary history: after antiquity, mostly confined to the
literatures of Greece and Rome, come: